Miscellaneous

One reason this task was so difficult for me is that you sort of had to switch gears... up to now in the book every problem involved moving through the list or making decisions about the list one element at a time. In this particular problem, a decision had to be made on a chunk of the input list not just one element.

So, this is the first case where I had to get a chunk of the string and develop code that operated as a function of a chunk of data as opposed to one piece.

I have not grokked the darcs source code, but from using it, I am willing to be that it has some very good file and i/o libraries that would be generally useful.

Has anyone considered factoring out this functionality into MissingH for re-use elsewhere?

There seem to be quite a few people reading this site, but not very many people writing here. Any thoughts on what would improve this site? Comments and brainstorms are welcome. Anything is on the table.

I was staring at Scala as it crossed freshmeat and it reminded me strongly of Haskell:

http://scala.epfl.ch/

By and large it does to me... anyone else?

This hardly has anything to do with functional programming in general, or Haskell in particular, but I'm a bit upset by the move to Intel processors. It seems to me that going with AMD might've been a more viable choice, at least from a ISA pov. Furthermore, while AMD chips still dissipate more power than Intel processors, the CPU's seem to be much nicer, better designed, and yield real 64-bit power.

Guess I won't be able to upgrade my powerbook status to a shiny G5 in a few years.

Haskell is very good at describing the structure or pattern involved in something. It excels at compiler design for this very reason.

It is also the reason that 5-line Perl programs take much longer in Haskell. For instance, look at this program to find the file with the longest length in Haskell:

http://www.aetion.com/src/Longest.hs

I have been a professional Perl programmer for 5 years. Perl5 is a wonderfully agile language. It was very odd that I would discover Haskell independantly right around the same time as Autrijus did.

Having stared at Perl6 and given 3 talks on it, I am convinced that it is a big confused mess. A BIG confused mess. I don't think it will be eagerly accepted and many people are going to stay with perl5 or find another language.

I want to go to the heart of computing. I am very impressed with Haskell for every reason that you could be. I worry that it is only 1/2 as fast as OCaml, but I demand to work in a pure functional language. While most people are very open-minded about languages, I am not. I am passionate and religious about whatever I involve myself in and I only get involved with what I think is right, not what is popular.

I have to get out of Perl while the getting is good. C++ holds some attraction for me. Much larger libraries than Haskell. Class-based programming with typing. Many apps are delivered in C++. This web browser I am using is probably written in it. My IRC client is C++-based. My chess database is as well... hmm wait a minute. I think I will look at C++ closer.

But anyway, I had been studying Haskell every day after work and then I got stressed and tensed and started avoiding. I need some way to sit down in front of my computer and study Haskell whether I like it or not. But until I get C++ out of my head, I am still a case of a divided mind.

More later...

Getting caught up on announcements here...

Issue Two of The Mondad.Reader is out. For issue two, the subjects are Template Haskell, better module compatibility, exploring dark corners of GHC, domain specific languages, and the Foreign Function Interface.

A new compiler, JHC, was recently announced. Its goal is to be able to compile Haskell code to ANSI C. A working prototype already exists.

The fptools CVS repository is now available in via a darcs mirror. There has been discussion about how a permanent conversion could be done.

I have switched this site from using a Bayesian spam filter to using Captchas. I've had a lot of success with this method against comment spam in the past, and I think it will make the site much more pleasant.

More details can be found in my blog.